A friend was once listening to The Köln Concert, a famous live solo album by the great jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, when his mother walked into the room. “What’s this you’re listening to?” she wanted to know. “It’s improvised jazz, mum.” Her brow furrowed. “Improvised? Hah – it sounds like he’s making it up as he goes along!”
Yes, jazz is a mystery to most, and not just to some mothers, but also to those young people who want to learn how to play it. But how can you teach something that’s made up as you go along?
Barry Harris had the answer. Before he died in 2021 at the age of 91, Harris was one of the last surviving bebop pioneers, having started playing piano in the 1930s in Detroit. He knew Charlie Parker, and went on to work with Coleman Hawkins, Cannonball Adderley, Dexter Gordon and just about everyone else of note in modern jazz. He even shared a home with Thelonious Monk at the mansion of the legendary Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, and carried on living there after both Monk and their aristocratic patron had died.
Animated by a powerful urge to pass the flame to future generations, Harris spent his later years teaching young musicians everything he knew. And he brought the flame to Europe – specifically to the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, which he visited for a week every March for many years.
“He would teach relentlessly,” remembers Niels Tausk, who was a 17-year-old trumpet player when he first met Harris, and now teaches at the Conservatoire himself. “He would start at 10 in the morning and go on until 10 in the evening with hardly a break. Incredible energy. He would teach piano classes, singers, horn players, a workshop with the rhythm sections, and in the evening, after teaching until 10, he would go to jam sessions and even sit in. So he would be tireless.”
When you watch one of the many YouTube videos of Barry Harris at work, it is immediately obvious why his students loved and revered him. You don’t have to be a musician to appreciate it: his knowledge of music was immense, his experience matchless, but through his charm, charisma and sense of humour, he also had the skill to enthuse his classes, and make them want to go home and practise.
“He had a good way of challenging the fastest in the class, but also slowing down the pace for the slowest in the class,” says Tausk. “Sometimes he would have 20 horn players. Some would grasp it immediately, and [for them] he would make it a little harder or faster or more complicated. And others would not hear what was going on, and he would go down to their level. So that was amazing – he would have something to offer for any level.”
Most of all, Harris would lead by example. “If he was accompanying a ballad, it would be so warm, so human, so touching. But he would swing his ass off too. Bloody fast tempos! On all the records on which he plays, the tempos are incredible, very fluent and swinging. And he had a nice bouncy sort of touch. The language of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, that kind of articulation and jazz feel was just oozing out of his pores.
“There’s a recording of his called The Bird of Red and Gold on which he sings. It’s one of his own compositions. I think that’s really warm.” Released in 1982, this recording can also be found on YouTube. Harris plays it solo, but his sense of rhythm is so perfect that you can almost hear what the non-existent bass and drums are playing in his head.
For a while during the 1980s and early 90s, Harris ran his own place in New York’s Chelsea neighbourhood, which he called the Jazz Cultural Theater. But most of the time he taught in a variety of venues, wherever he could find a piano and some students.
American guitarist Dan Nicholas remembers going to classes in crummy buildings with leaks in the plumbing, and paying $10 for a two-hour session. Having started out as a saxophonist, he had stumbled across Harris almost by chance when he visited a saxophone sales and repair shop on 48th Street and saw a flyer advertising the classes. “So I checked it out and realised there was no way I could do it on the saxophone, and brought my guitar back the next day.” Eventually Nicholas followed Harris to The Hague, so he could immerse himself for an entire week.
Apart from occasional one-off appearances, Harris never taught through official American institutions. “They asked him to teach at Harvard at one point, but then they couldn’t go ahead with it because he didn’t have any official degree, so they couldn’t have him teach. And then a year later he got an honorary doctorate from Northwestern University!”
One British musician who attended the New York sessions was the pianist Rob Barron, now professor of jazz piano at London’s Guildhall School of Music. “I knew that he ran this six-hour marathon session every Tuesday. It was in this community centre with lots of different things going on, like dance classes, and he had one floor where he had his grand piano and drums and bass. There weren’t just piano players there, there were horn players as well. And a lot of it was Barry showing stuff with a lot of people crowded around the piano, so everyone’s looking over his shoulder. And he’s highly revered with his teaching, because he’s so hands-on – ‘This is what I do’ – and showing you stuff. He could explain it very clearly.
“Of all the teachers I’ve had, he was definitely the most clear in explaining things, and even after having four years of music college, he was showing me some stuff I never thought of before.”
As well as being funny and playful, Harris was a man of boundless generosity. “He would talk to you about music constantly, any time,” says Dan Nicholas. “You could call him up in the middle of the night.” He also had the gift of simplifying things without dumbing them down. “A lot of people have this idea of jazz being such a theory-laden animal, [but] his rhythm was just spectacular and there weren’t any real rhythmic exercises. It was communicated in performance, there was nothing that you could really verbalise. But he had unbelievable depth in his rhythm and his phrasing. And he spoke that way, too. He sang the things that way, he expressed things with this incredible rhythm.”
Tausk elaborates. “He didn’t consider himself a singer or anything, but he would know a lot of lyrics. A song, especially if it’s a jazz standard from the Great American Songbook, is not just a melody with some chords and rhythm, it has words, and he really found that important as well. So he would coach all the singers, and make them understand what they were singing.”
When discussing the different chords that could be used in a song, Harris would sit at the piano and explain, “You could say this” or “You could say it this way.” Not, you will notice, play it, because music is a language. Harris was preoccupied by the question of what composers and musicians were trying to say. In jazz, musicians talk about their “vocabulary” – the musical scales and modes and phrases they have learned that enable them to flesh out their improvised solos.
Even the pandemic couldn’t stop him. Every week, right up to his death, he carried on doing his workshops online, conducting them from his house. “He just had such a passion to keep this music alive,” says Barron. “He had a real drive, almost like a calling, passing this style on through the generations. He was pretty sick when he was doing these things online, but you could tell he got a lot of joy out of it, but not from any ego point of view. There was never any ego with Barry. It was never ‘I know this and you don’t know this’.”
While superficially the traditions of jazz and European classical music are a world apart, Harris saw no essential distinction between them. He knew that 20th-century classical composers such as Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel were interested in ragtime and early jazz and incorporated it into their own work. A few decades later, the likes of Gil Evans and Miles Davis returned the favour. Harris saw no difference between the way Bach or Chopin used harmony and the way bebop pioneer Bud Powell did.
This cross-fertilisation has long muddied the distinction between jazz and classical music (George Gershwin, anyone?), and at the same time, the dominant musical styles have shifted geographically, too. Some go so far as to claim that the epicentre of classical music these days is no longer in Europe but the Far East – China, Japan, Korea. In the same way, others believe that Europe, where “classical music” began, is now the real epicentre of jazz.
Although the USA is indisputably where it began, Europe is the continent in which the most interesting new music is being made, and jazz as an art form certainly seems more popular here than it is in the land of its birth. Italy alone, for example, hosts 300 jazz festivals annually.
“Certainly in Holland and Germany jazz is hugely popular,” says Barron. “I would define jazz generally in two areas – there’s the American-influenced jazz and then there’s a lot of jazz in Europe that hasn’t really got a lot to do with American influence. So Europe does have its own sound, especially if you go to Scandinavia. There’s a lot more contemporary music on [record] labels like ECM. Berlin as well. They’re playing what they call jazz music, and that’s valid. But it has very little to do with the roots of swing and blues. So maybe it’s more eclectic in Europe, maybe it’s broader in Europe.”
Barry Harris was a musician and teacher who, despite his devotion to bebop, looked to European classical music as a foundation. His inspiration has created a bridge between these worlds.
Peter Jones is a jazz musician, journalist and author
